By Steven Jiang, CEO and co-founder at hireEZ

It’s amazing how much has changed in a year. A COVID-19-driven drop in employment was just slowly correcting itself as we rang in the new year in 2021. 

Today? The Great Resignation is in full force. In the last year, an average of nearly 4 million Americans quit their job every month. Job openings have spiked from a pandemic low of under 5 million open jobs to over 10 million. Unemployment has dropped below 4% and wages have increased nearly 5%. 

Whatever you want to call the Great Resignation, Reshuffle, or Reset, it’s impacting businesses. Your favorite restaurant might not be open as many hours as it used to be. The lack of workers in critical supply chain roles is challenging other global supply issues. Manufacturers and retailers dependent on a well-oiled supply chain system are dealing with stock issues. Tech companies have dealt with talent shortages for years, only to have the pressure increase.  

In fact, it’s hard to find an industry that isn’t acutely affected by the Great Resignation. 

Not a temporary challenge

There are some organizations that have essentially decided to try to wait out this moment. They hope that things will go “back to normal.” That they’ll be able to make candidates jump through hoops, ghost them for weeks on end, and still get all the employees they need in order to be successful. That they won’t have to change how they are finding talent. 

Unemployment won’t stay low forever. The number of open jobs and the number of people who quit will certainly go down at some point too. 

But there’s a more fundamental shift taking place. Going back to the old way of doing things — not treating candidates with respect or meeting their unique needs — is a good way to set a company up for the sequel to the Great Resignation. Even if employers have an advantage, that advantage is only temporary and record quit levels show that people are happy to take their talent elsewhere. 

A new model of building workforces in the future needs to come to fruition. Otherwise, this cycle of being able to find people when the economy is down and struggling mightily when things are good will never be broken. 

What needs to change?

Most talent acquisition today is very passive. Companies advertise open opportunities, primarily on job boards like Indeed. Then they cross their fingers and hope that people apply. 

Sure, a company can spend more to show up at the top of search results or get featured in emails to candidates. But you’re still hoping that someone (hopefully, multiple someones) is willing to go through the process of uploading their resume and applying for a job. 

That’s tough today, with just 0.6 unemployed people per job opening. That means, even if every unemployed person were perfectly matched with a job, 40% of jobs would still be left unfilled. 

Companies can’t just wait for people to apply. Instead of waiting for inbound interest, organizations have to make a shift to outbound recruiting. 

When people think of outbound recruiting, they might be thinking of headhunter calls or spammy messages on LinkedIn. That’s because most of the technologies out there for hiring have focused on managing inbound candidates and traffic. 

Companies need a new set of outbound recruiting tools that help them engage with people directly, with insights about the candidate and the ability to reach out to them with relevant information. These tools should also help companies reach diverse, untapped, and underrepresented talent pools. With the help of robust and governed AI, technology like this can be scaled ethically to match candidates with people. 

Jobs need to find people

Outbound recruiting flips the paradigm on job seeking as well. 

Most of the time, people have to spend significant time finding a job. Doing different searches, applying for roles, and managing interviews? It can be a full-time job if you’re unemployed, or a second job if you’re working or going to school.

Outbound recruiting is about a job finding the right person. With advanced technology like AI, and a recruiting function that can spend more time on building relationships, organizations can deliver jobs to people instead of the other way around.

Outbound recruiting might be a matter of survival now as companies try to keep the doors open and product moving. Companies are desperate for any help they can get. 

But this approach is about more than just getting through a historic talent shortage. It’s about giving people and companies more control over the process. Companies can reach out to the right people and people can get information on attractive jobs they may have never searched for. 

This is why hireEZ (formerly Hiretual) is making its mission to make outbound recruiting easy. When companies can no longer afford to sit back and wait, hireEZ offers them an AI-powered outbound recruitment platform that is designed to help recruiters overcome the inherent challenges of traditional inbound recruiting. With access to 750 million candidate profiles from more than 45 open web platforms, organizations can tap a diverse (and often hidden) talent pool. 

hireEZ helps organizations move faster and scale by intelligently sourcing, engaging, analyzing, and integrating top talent without upending existing enterprise platforms. It’s all possible because our focus from the very start was to help jobs find people. Today, that outbound recruiting platform has arrived.